Would this happen in a one-party state?

Even in a country like the UK with its long tradition of fair play, an active and usually liberal civil society, and independent institutions, it took almost three decades to uncover a cover-up and a perversion of justice about 96 men, women and children who died in the Hillsborough stadium disaster in April 1989.

The cover-up has taken almost three decades to be torn down. A government inquiry, the Taylor Report, concluded that the disaster was caused primarily by a failure of police control. The inquest into the deaths of the victims was completed in 1991 and recorded a verdict of accidental death. The refusal of the families to accept the inquest’s findings led to a campaign to have the evidence re-examined. This eventually led to the formation of independent panel, which in turn resulted in a High Court decision in 2012 to order a new inquest. That investigation concluded on April 26th with the very different verdict of unlawful killing.

The critics of the PAP administration would point to the SGH tragedy, the deaths during NS training, the frequent MRT breakdowns as examples of our Hillsboroughs that need exposing.

Even without going so far, the official response to the SGH tragedy “no one is really responsible” (my interpretation of what the Health Minister said in parly leaves a bad taste in the mouth. As does the failure of accountability in SMRT and other TLCs and GLCs when goof-ups occur (think NO and, SGX for starters).

In a one party-state, the party must be protected against the people.

In China, a de jure one-party state the CCP’s concerns were made clear in a document that began circulating in secret in April 2013 and was later leaked. Document Number Nine, as it is called, describes “the current state of the ideological sphere” and identifies seven challenges to it. They include Western constitutional democracy, universal values, civil society, neoliberalism and “the West’s idea of journalism”

Now isn’t our very own PAP worried about Western constitutional democracy, universal values, civil society, neoliberalism and “the West’s idea of journalism”.

To end, only in a de facto one party state,

— can the loser in a by-election who lost by 22 points can say “[I]t doesn’t feel like [a] loss”.

— and for anti-PAP cyberwarriots (more likely to be nutty than rational) to proclaim that the PAP should be afraid, very afraid because it only won by 22 points.

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